My 13-year daughter came home from health class with a troubling assignment.
“List everything you eat and do for the next three days,” her teacher told her. “Then calculate calories taken in versus calories burned off. We’ll share our logs in class.”
While this may sound like an enriching project in nutrition and exercise, my daughter and many of her classmates were aghast. Recording anything about their bodies was uncomfortable enough. But in a co-ed class where one overweight girl was teased with the words, “your belt could stretch around the equator,” and another handful refuse to eat lunch at school for fear of being labeled “fat,” sharing food/exercise logs is awkward, if not dangerous.
Adolescents scrutinize their bodies. Teens compare their bodies to those of other teens. Fearing criticism, many of my daughter’s friends made up fake food logs or, in my daughter’s case, opted out of the assignment.
What a waste of time and effort in the perfect forum for education. Eating disorder awareness and prevention can be done at school. If done right.
I came across a recent study that evaluated several school-based programs aimed at eating disorder prevention.
Researchers offered 349 female secondary school students (n = 349) either:
- Full prevention program -- learning basic concepts of nutrition, criticism of aesthetic models of beauty emphasizing extreme thinness, media literacy
- A partial version of the program -- without nutritional education
- No prevention program.
The researchers also tracked whether or not students carried distinct risk factors for eating disorders including, early menarche, being overweight, dieting and/or negative attitudes about food and perceived pressure to be thin.
In the end, both the full and partial prevention programs reduced perceived pressure to be thin and improved eating attitudes and knowledge of nutrition in all the participants, regardless of risk. Even more striking, the programs had greater effects among girls at high risk.
The study shows that school-based programs can be have marked effects on reducing the onset of eating disorders in middle-school girls, especially those who need help most. But the program has to be one that students will buy into and one that addresses more than the numbers, calories in and calories out.
